just you and me (and the rest of the world) || anakin & ahsoka

Chapter 3

i'm having so much fun writing this let's pray i don't burn out-

—

When he first sees it, he can feel his heartbeat quicken.

It's shaped like a diamond, like the markings on her forehead. The light in the little shop reflects off of the iridescent, golden charm, the chain the exact same color. It's a choker, he thinks. He hasn't had much experience with jewelery, so he's not entirely sure. All that matters to him is that it's a locket, and it's in his very limited price range, way on the high end, but affordable nevertheless.

He already knows what picture he's going to put in it. Well, he has two options, actually. The first one is just the two of them, when she was a baby. They're at his mom's apartment, and she's learning how to walk. He's sixteen in it, standing behind her with a finger in each of her chubby fists as she tilts her head back to babble up at him while balancing on shaky legs, looking like the happiest little togruta in the galaxy. The look on his face is nothing less than absolute adoration. He's smiling down at her like she's the most precious gift he's ever been given.

And she is.

The second photo is one that he isn't as fond of, but he wants to give her the option to include her mother in the locket, depsite her complaints about the woman the night before. Ahsoka is about two or three in it, he guesses (it's difficult to tell her age in the pictures where her montrals haven't begun to develop into anything more than tiny bumps at the top of her head yet), and sitting on her mother, Dunayra's, lap, him behind the both of them with a hand on each of their shoulders. The crimson togruta has her lips pulled in a tight smile while he and Ahsoka are both fully showing their teeth, or, lack of, in Ahsoka's case. It's a formal photo—one that Ayra had insisted on having taken. They'd gone to get it printed just a few months before splitting up.

The two had never been married. In fact, they had broken up when Ayra was two months into her pregnancy, not that either of them had known that yet. After discovering that she was expecting a child—Anakin's child—she had told him immediately. Spending so much time together at healer's appointments, and living together after Ayra's parents had kicked her out and Shmi, his mother, had taken her in, their relationship had grown stronger. Two weeks before Ahsoka had been born, they'd begun dating again, only to break up for good, three years later.

"Can I help you?" a nautolan man asks from behind the counter, a pearl necklace around his neck.

"Yes," Anakin replies, letting his thoughts fade away as he focuses his eyes on the man, rather than the necklace. "I'd like to buy this locket," he says, pointing at the choker, careful to not let his finger touch the transparisteel and smudge the display.

The nautolan nods and flips the case open from the other side, taking the delicate object off of its display.

He doesn't know what it is about the necklace, but Anakin can just feel that this is as close to the perfect gift for her that he's going to get. The perfect gift would be tickets to the topside speeder bike races next week that she hadn't stopped talking about for the past month and a half. He'd looked into it and found that it would probably take him a whole year to make enough money for two tickets.

He still hasn't told her that it's not happening. He knows that she'll understand, but he wishes, more than anything, that he could give her what she really wants.

But he's put a lot of thought into the locket and he knows that, to her, that's all that will matter.

"Here you go," the man says, handing the boxed necklace to him.

"Thank you," Anakin replies, smiling down at the maroon, velvet case in his hands. "Thank you so much."

He makes his way over to the line in front of the cash register, standing behind a twi'lek lady while she pays for a set of lekku ringlets. A human woman steps behind him in line.